Today we live in a diversified world with a seemingly infinite number of diverse and different sources of on-line information. Typically, this information is accessed via a network such as the Internet. As the Internet and, more generally, computing evolve, people are beginning to become accustomed to and demanding better access to different types of electronically available information.
Against the backdrop of the diverse and different sources of electronic information is the wide range of devices that are connected being used to access the information. For example, people can now typically access network-accessible information using personal computers, handheld computers, personal digital assistants and the like. The situations encountered by individuals attempting to access this diverse collection of information using an ever growing collection of computing devices differs from user session to user session.
For example, some contents may be authored and suitable for use with a certain type of browser. Yet, the contents may not be suitably acceptable for use in other situations. For example, web contents that are authored for use in connection with a browser installed on a personal computer may not be suitable for display on a small handheld device for reasons not the least of which include the size disparity between the different devices' displays.
One possible solution for this problem is to author the same contents so that they reside in different forms that are suitable for all of the different situations that might be encountered. While this is theoretically possible, the solution is practically infeasible due to the time and expense involved.
One area of promise is in the area of so-called adaptive content delivery. One goal of adaptive content delivery is to have content that is readily or easily adaptable to different computing environments.
Early commercial applications focused on providing faster web page downloads for narrow bandwidth connected users (such as dialup and mobile access). Most of the applications accelerated downloads by simply reducing the sizes of embedded image files using aggressive lossy compression schemes. The cost of this solution is lower quality, which is highly undesirable from a customer service standpoint. Some schemes also supported lossless text compression to reduce the transmission time of web pages.
Some companies such as ProxyNet (based on TranSend technology), SpyGlass, and OnlineAnywhere provide proxies or servers that can adjust web pages to fit the display of smaller devices. Their technologies, however, are based on heuristic rules and customized content filters that are designed for specific websites and are used to extract the most important contents from these web pages. Thus, these solutions tend to be rigid and inflexible.
Accordingly, this invention arose out of concerns associated with providing adaptive systems and methods for efficient and flexible content delivery.